Breaking Defense:
Long-range R&D for missile defense is being squeezed by near-term needs, warns a new report from the Center for Strategic & International Studies. The problem? The duties of the Missile Defense Agency keep expanding even as its budget shrinks. CSIS’s solution? Reform MDA in either of two ways:
- return MDA to its R&D-only roots as “the DARPA of missile defense” by transferring procurement and operations & maintenance functions to the services; or
- expand MDA with not only more money but a wider mandate similar to that of Special Operations Command, which does both R&D and high-priority combat operations.
Keeping Congress from plussing up aid to Israel’s Iron Dome, Arrow, and David’s Sling programs at the expense of US defenses would also go a long way, CSIS says.
In some ways, MDA’s a victim of its own success, write CSIS missile defense director Tom Karako and his co-authors. Its predecessor agencies in the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton eras could concentrate on long-term research & development because there wasn’t much ready for the short term: Most missile defense technology at the time was too immature to deploy. The great exception, the famous Patriot, was developed by MDA’s forebears but then transferred back to the Army.
But since 9/11, MDA has matured, fielded, and kept funding three major missile defense systems: homeland GMD, land-based THAAD, and ship-fired SM-3. None has been transferred to the services. Procurement, operations & maintenance, and military construction for all three systems still come out of the MDA budget.
And maybe that’s as it should be, CSIS hastens to say. Patriot lost both funding and leadership focus when it was given back to the Army, which has plenty of other priorities in its budget — from combat boots to attack helicopters — that are dearer to its institutional heart than missile defense. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) that protects the homeland is a particularly poor fit for any service’s portfolio, Karako & co. argue. (The Union of Concerned Scientists, which has opposed missile defense since the “Star Wars” days, would also say GMD just plain doesn’t work, as argued in depth in UCS’s own latest study).
